The Producers: Springtime for Hitler at Admiralspalast, Berlin - review

Mel Brooks' musical The Producers, which lampoons Hitler, was staged in
Germany for the first time this weekend.

Self-mocking Germans: Springtime for Hitler

By Florence Waters

10:36AM BST 18 May 2009

The setting promised a very German evening at the theatre: two neat ticket queues, pretzels served in the foyer, and an audience that represented a tidy proportion of the world's theatre-going crew-cuts. But it was a far from typical German night out – so how would the crowd gel with the impending punch-lines?

Despite warnings from critics that Germans don't laugh at Nazis, Mel Brooks's musical The Producers, which lampoons Hitler, was staged in Germany for the first time this weekend – in the very theatre in which the Führer had a private box.

"Should one be allowed to laugh about Hitler?" asked the daily Berliner Morgenpost. And the answer, ringing out from every stall on Friday night, was an affirmative yes. Moreover, Hitler received a standing ovation and some audience members even waved parody Nazi flags bearing wurst instead of swastikas.

The story is about a crooked Jewish Broadway producer, Max Bialystock, who decides the easiest way to get rich is to stage a West End flop and gets his comeuppance when Springtime for Hitler is hailed as a satirical masterpiece. Brooks's musical was staged in the German language last year for the first time, in Vienna, but closed two months early after a bad run.

Unfortunately, much of the dry wit of the original script is lost in the translated version, while the slapstick humour is grossly overplayed. Bialystock (Cornelius Obonya) is portrayed as a thigh-slapping buffoon. His partner, Leo Bloom (Andreas Bieber), capsizes into painful pantomime. His wackier lines are lost, and the duo's playful exchanges amount to a charmless episode of ChuckleVision.

None the less, the ice is sufficiently broken in time for the darkest moment in the play – lights dim and zombie-like Nazis hold hands with puppets to form a singing and rotating human swastika – so that it somehow manages to walk that uneasy tightrope between the chilling and the absolutely hilarious.